The energy captured in its concentrated beam was equal to 1,000 times the world’s electricity consumption, reported the Asahi Shimbun. The laser emitted a 2-petawatt, or 2-quadrillion-watt, output.

It was able to achieve that highly-concentrated energy by consolidating the power to a blast lasting one pico-second, or one-trillionth of a second. The researchers at the Institute of Laser Engineering used a massive LFEX, which stands for Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments, which uses four sets of devices within itself to repeatedly amplify the laser.

The researchers aren’t done, yet. Junji Kawanaka, an associate professor at the university, said they plan to increase their output to 10 petawatts.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/07/29/worlds-most-powerful-laser/feed/0Close up of strong steel chainlorenzettifortuneHow Nike’s medieval ice pack helmet will cool athletes’ skullshttp://fortune.com/2015/07/28/nike-cooling-helmet/
http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/nike-cooling-helmet/#commentsTue, 28 Jul 2015 18:28:39 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1222232]]>According to Nike, pouring a bottle of water on your head isn’t a good enough way to cool down after finishing a decathlon. The sporting goods company’s solution? A super-cooling piece of headgear, which doesn’t have a price tag yet, but is surely more expensive than a water bottle.

The device fits snugly like a hat on the forehead, head and neck, then drapes over the face with loose mesh. It may make athletes look straight out of a Friday the 13th set, but the cooling effect might be worth the bad photos. The hood is like a head-shaped ice pack, which surrounds the athlete with chilled water.

In a Nike NKEpress release, Olympic decathlete Ashton Eaton, who is partnering with Nike to create the headgear, explains why he wants to wear a medieval ice pack helmet: “A perfect scenario would be to fell like you’ve just started on every event. There more you do, the more attrition you experience.” For Eaton, cooling off quickly isn’t a matter of comfort: it helps him regenerate between his ten events.

Eaton is testing the prototypes for Nike in the months leading to the 2016 Summer Olympics, according to Wired. Olympic athlete Brianne Theisen-Eaton, who is married to Eaton, will be testing out the hood during her summer training as well.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/nike-cooling-helmet/feed/0Nike_Track_Cooling_Mask_dark_HERO_V3_native_1600clairegrodenThe Guardian talks about why it is launching a mobile news labhttp://fortune.com/2015/06/16/guardian-mobile-news/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/guardian-mobile-news/#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 21:46:07 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1179202]]>The Guardian, which has grown from being just another regional British newspaper into one of the largest news websites in the world, announced recently that it is launching a mobile journalism lab based out of its U.S. office. The project, which is funded by a $2.6-million grant from the Knight Foundation, will involve researching different ways of delivering the news and engaging with readers via their mobile devices.

In its news release, the paper said it would “assemble a multidisciplinary editorial and production team that includes designers, developers and reporters and embed it within its news operations.” In addition to helping the U.S. unit do better at mobile, the Guardian said its team will “look at ways of engaging readers in storytelling in real time and at advancing citizen participation.”

In keeping with the policy of “open journalism” that former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger made one of the paper’s core principles, The Guardian said all of the data and research from the project will be shared with the public and other media outlets, including any prototypes or tools developed by the team.

I wanted to know a little bit more about what The Guardian had in mind for this project, so Fortune asked Lee Glendinning, the editor in charge of the paper’s U.S. operation. What follows are her responses via email:

How did this project come about?

The Guardian and the Knight Foundation share a commitment to promoting journalism through innovation across platforms and through technology. We thought that, as a whole, the media industry still doesn't know enough about what works and what doesn't on mobile, so the aim of this project is about experimenting with how journalism can evolve on mobile platforms, and then sharing the results of our experiments for the benefit of the wider news industry.

How many staff will be involved in the project?

There will be a dedicated team working full-time on this project, based in our New York newsroom. The lab will include engineers and developers, as well as reporters, designers and production staff. It’s too early to confirm exact numbers, we’ll be working through the structure and resource requirements in the initial weeks of the project.

What specifically will the team be doing?

That’s exactly the sort of question we’re going to be working through in the coming days and weeks. The ambition of the lab is to challenge our thinking and to experiment as much as possible so we’re not limiting ourselves to anything specific at this point. The lab will also play a critical role in The Guardian’s wider mobile strategy and innovation efforts, and will work with our global teams to integrate learnings from our existing partnerships such as Facebook Instant Articles and the new Apple 'News' app.

How it will the data be made transparent?

We’ll aim to share our learnings and data through a dedicated blog, similar to next.theguardian.com, where we shared updates about the open redesign of our website. We’ll also work with third parties to establish and test methodologies and to disseminate our findings to the wider news industry.

Why does The Guardian see this as important?

Currently, over half our traffic comes from people using a mobile device and the shift to mobile has already had huge implications for the ways we think about our our journalism, because it signals not simply a change in platform but a fundamental shift in reader behaviour. So we think it’s important to explore how the rise of mobile might require the rethinking of journalistic processes across the board, including news gathering, reporting, publishing and citizen engagement.

What affect will this have on the industry?

We hope our experiments within the lab, and the learnings and data we will share, will encourage the wider industry to lean and adopt new ways of working and new tools to tell stories in more compelling and engaging ways on mobile.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/guardian-mobile-news/feed/0Preview Day Ahead Of Mobile World Congress 2015MathewWhy Facebook’s algorithm matters: because 60% of millennials get news therehttp://fortune.com/2015/06/01/facebook-algorithm-news-millennials/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/01/facebook-algorithm-news-millennials/#commentsMon, 01 Jun 2015 22:45:04 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1147814]]>Younger Internet users like to joke about how Facebook “is the new TV,” but in the case of political news consumption that appears to be literally true, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center for Media and Journalism. More than 60% of millennials who were surveyed said that during the previous week they got their political news from Facebook, compared with 37% who got it from TV.

For older members of the “Baby Boom” generation, meanwhile, those figures were almost exactly reversed: about 60 percent of that age group said they got most of their political news from local television, with about 39% saying they got it from Facebook (only 14% of millennials said they got political news from Twitter).

If nothing else, the survey provides more evidence that political activists and sociologists are right to be concerned about the influence that the Facebook news-feed algorithm can have on the news that users are exposed to. Even small tweaks to the Facebook ecosystem and the types of content that are shown in the feed could have a huge effect on a large segment of the population, and in largely unexpected ways.

Pew Research Center

The sources of political news that millennial users cited as the most common after the giant social network were CNN, local TV stations and Google News, followed by ABC, Fox, NBC and Yahoo. Those from “Generation X” also gave Facebook as the place where they most often get their news, with 51% giving it as the number one source, followed by local TV stations and then CNN. Google News ranked far higher for millennial audiences than it did for either Gen X or the Baby Boomers.

Facebook came under fire recently for a study that it funded, done by a number of in-house scientists, which looked at whether news-feed users were subjected to differing political points of view. Although the study said that the decisions of users themselves determined how much they were exposed to different points of view, a number of experts took issue with that explanation.

These experts pointed out that Facebook’s own data confirmed that for one test group, the algorithmically filtered news-feed did affect the amount of alternative political commentary and news they were exposed to. But even more important than that, Facebook’s study pretended that a user’s experience on the site could be looked at separately from the functioning of the algorithm, when the two are so closely linked that it’s almost impossible to separate them.

One prominent critic of Facebook’s algorithmic filtering, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina, pointed out in a piece published on Medium that the way an algorithm functions can have real-world consequences--as it arguably did during the violence in Ferguson, Mo. after a black man was shot by police even though he was unarmed. Many Facebook users didn’t see that news, but instead saw innocuous videos of celebrities taking the “Ice Bucket Challenge.”

Facebook has also been criticized in the past for removing content that breaches its internal standards, even if that content has a news or public-policy value to it. So, for example, investigative journalist Eliot Higgins complained that the site removed pages belonging to Syrian rebel groups, even though some of those pages were the only source of important information about the ongoing civil war in that country.

What are the long-term implications of Facebook’s influence over the news diet of younger users? We don’t know. Which is why journalists like George Brock of City University in London have tried to challenge the giant social network to take some responsibility for how its algorithm helps shape a user’s view of the world. And it’s even more reason to be concerned that some media companies are handing over their content to Facebook, putting them at the mercy of that algorithm.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/01/facebook-algorithm-news-millennials/feed/0#F5002015 FacebookMathewPew millennial surveyPew millennial study 2How your cell phone knows if you’ve been laid offhttp://fortune.com/2015/05/27/cell-phone-records-layoffs/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/27/cell-phone-records-layoffs/#commentsWed, 27 May 2015 15:25:37 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1138738]]>Your cell phone is pretty good at tracking your schedule. Say, you typically call your mom during lunch on Tuesday or you call you child everyday at 3:30 p.m. to make sure they got home from school. Or it’s Thursday happy hour and you’re calling to say you’ll miss dinner again this week.

So, the moment your schedule changes, your cell phone is often the first to reap the evidence. And it looks like that shift in calling patterns is a pretty good indicator if you’ve lost your job, according to new research.

A team of professors from top universities across the country looked at millions of cell-phone records from an unidentified European country from 2006 to 2007. In one city of 15,000 people, about 1,100 workers were laid off from an auto-parts manufacturing plant. The researchers identified those people and followed their call logs to compare them to those of a control group of workers still employed.

Researchers found that those who were laid off made and received 21% fewer calls after a month out of the job compared to the working group. They also didn’t move around as much. Their calls originated from 15% fewer cell-phone towers. Essentially, the workers who lost their jobs where less social and less mobile than their employed counterparts.

This may sound like more creepy big brother than helpful, but the implications could be huge. Using this kind of tracking on a large scale could better reveal the larger trends in the unemployment rate for an area, possibly even weeks before government surveys are released.

The researchers don’t have access to any U.S. data, nor do they have ongoing records from the European nation--there’s major privacy concerns even if the data could be anonymized. So, for now, the research is simply proof of concept.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/27/cell-phone-records-layoffs/feed/0Businesswoman texting on cell phone at office desklorenzettifortuneSelf destructing electronics are coming—and then melting awayhttp://fortune.com/2015/05/22/self-destructing-electronics/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/22/self-destructing-electronics/#commentsFri, 22 May 2015 14:27:45 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1133366]]>Researchers at the University of Illinois have created electronics that will self destruct on command. The technology uses a radio frequency, acid and a layer of wax on the circuit to let the devices melt with an application of heat or based on a signal from a remote signal. While this sounds like the perfect bit of technology to include in your next note to Mission: Impossible‘s Ethan Hunt, the research has some very practical applications from security to environmental protection.

As we put more electronics into everyday devices such as furniture and toothbrushes throwing them away becomes a problem as the electronic components should be recycled instead. Including this type of technology that can break the electronics down using a specific environmental trigger, would allow the metals and other non biodegradable elements to dissolve down to their molecular elements for recycling, according to the researchers.

The researchers have dissolved electronics in water, which could be used for biomedical implants, but in this experiment, they used heat as the trigger. They embedded a weak acid in a bit of wax on the circuit. When the wax is heated the acid is released and dissolves the components. To remotely trigger the reaction, researchers install a heating coil that the radio signal turns on. That in turn, melts the wax.

The security aspects of the technology are easy to see. It’s possible to use this to disable elements of a device should it fall into the wrong hands, or after a certain amount of time, making the idea of limited time electronic access devices really limited. From a blog post describing the technology at the university’s web site:

The researchers can control how fast the device degrades by tuning the thickness of the wax, the concentration of the acid, and the temperature. They can design a device to self-destruct within 20 seconds to a couple of minutes after heat is applied.

The devices also can degrade in steps by encasing different parts in waxes with different melting temperatures. This gives more precise control over which parts of a device are operative, creating possibilities for sophisticated devices that can sense something in the environment and respond to it.

I’m not sure what this means for using these electronics during the summer in Texas, or if this might lead to more tales of exploding electronics, but I’m all for technology that helps offset the heavy environmental cost that more electronics will take on the environment.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/22/self-destructing-electronics/feed/0Mission: ImpossibleshigginbothamPhilips moves R&D center to Cambridge, Mass. and pledges $25 million to MIThttp://fortune.com/2015/05/19/philips-rd-mit/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/19/philips-rd-mit/#commentsTue, 19 May 2015 19:31:44 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1128147]]>Dutch company Philips is heading to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. The company has signed a $25 million, five-year research alliance with the university and is moving its U.S. R&D headquarters to Cambridge, Mass. from its current headquarters in Westchester County, New York where it’s been for the last 67 years.

“The old headquarters were founded very much on this older philosophy of R&D where you needed to be in a quiet place for research and then you handed your ideas to the business for commercialization,” said Henk van Houten, executive vice president & general manager, Philips Research.

But now that philosophy has changed and R&D must be more integrated with the business, as well as with startups and other potential partners in big businesses and academia. Given that Philips will focus on lighting and healthcare technology for its R&D, Boston makes a considerable amount of sense, especially on the health side. There are plenty of academics who can parse data as well as research hospitals willing to explore how the combination of sensors, connected technology, and predictive algorithms can come together to help deliver better patient care, especially in the home.

Remote patient monitoring and helping address the management of chronic diseases, such as Philips’ work with managing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are top research priorities. Other projects might include helping develop better machine learning for ultrasound, so it can be used as a diagnostic tool by those who are not doctors, said van Houten. On the connected lighting front, the main research areas would center around smart cities initiatives, where street lighting takes on multiple roles.

With the help of MIT scientists, who knows what else Philips can come up with?

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/19/philips-rd-mit/feed/0HealthPatchshigginbothamScientists win when they are social with their work, study showshttp://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 16:58:55 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1113688]]>Scientific publishing is much like the regular media world, except that instead of being measured by clicks or pageviews, researchers are judged according to the number of citations they get in papers written by other scientists. But in both cases, being social with your work seems to help a great deal: according to a study by Academia.edu that was released this week, scientists who shared their papers on the service got 83% more citations than those who didn’t.

Interestingly enough, the influence of this social behavior seems to display a kind of “long tail” effect over time--after one year of being shared on the network, papers have an average of 37% more citations, and after three years that climbs to 58% more citations, and hits 83% after five years. The study looked at more than 44,000 papers on a wide range of scientific topics.

Since Academia.edu is a venture-funded social network whose entire purpose is to get researchers to publish their papers there, this result may not come as a big surprise. But CEO Richard Price--who started the company after getting a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford--says the study and its conclusions were rigorously tested by the data scientists at Polynumeral. Academia.edu is also publishing all of the data behind the paper on the code-sharing and blogging site Github so anyone can challenge it. Said Price:

I think this may be the most scrutinized piece of research ever done in this area. We are posting the study, along with the data set of 44,000 papers, and we are posting the code on Github, in keeping with our open-science principles. We’re also going to email the study and data to all 21 million of our members.

The study also showed that posting a paper on Academia.edu was better--from a citation point of view--than just publishing it on a personal blog, or on any of the sites that also offer open-access scientific publishing, such as ArXiv or PLoS (the Public Library of Science). After five years, papers published on Academia.edu had an average of 75% more citations than those published elsewhere online.

The key, Price said, is the discovery tools that the site has developed, which are similar to social features offered by social platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Scientists can choose to follow certain topics and get notified of new research, and they can also follow specific authors. Articles that fit their criteria show up in a Facebook-style “news feed.” Said Price:

Scientists used to go to the library and thumb through the journals on the academic journal rack if they wanted to catch up on the latest research in their field. But open-access networks like Academia.edu are the new journal rack--and they are better because they are social, and you have discovery features, so you can reach a lot more people.

Much like the traditional media industry, academic publishing has been undergoing a sea change over the past several years--but instead of a broad market of newspapers and magazines fighting for advertising as digital and mobile take over, academic publishing has seen the cozy oligopoly of publishers like Elsevier disrupted by the rise of more digitally oriented, “open access” networks such as Academia.edu, PLoS (the Public Library of Science), ArXiv.org, and ResearchGate.

For years, Elsevier and others had a great business publishing scientific research in a variety of restricted-access journals and then charging universities and academics relatively huge sums to get access to those articles. This system was what activist and hacker Aaron Swartz was fighting against when he broke into the MIT computer network and downloaded millions of articles from the JSTOR service (he was subsequently charged with a number of felonies and later committed suicide).

Over time, however, more and more academics have been publishing their research on open networks like ArXiv and Academia.edu, and some government agencies and other charitable institutions that fund research have mandated that any studies they help to finance must be made available publicly. Over time, Price said, the industry will likely shift to one in which funding bodies pay directly to have their research published in open-access journals--a system called APC, for “article processing charge.”

That’s great if you are an open-access network like Academia.edu or PLoS or ArXiv. But if you are Elsevier and other traditional publishers, all you can see is the $10 billion or so that is spent on journal publishing going to open access instead of into your pocket. That’s part of the reason why Elsevier acquired one of the early open-access networks, known as Mendeley, in 2013. The company has also used takedown orders in the past to try and cripple sites like Academia.edu.

Price said in the near future, his service wants to become a full-fledged academic publisher--and that includes implementing features that will change the way that academic peer-review is done, he said. “The current process is just much too slow and too cumbersome,” he said. “My thesis took three years to get published, and there’s just no reason why it has to take that long. We’d also like researchers to be able to share the code and datasets behind their research.”

According to Price, Academia.edu is already the largest social-publishing network for scientists, with about 35 million unique visitors a month and about 21 million registered users. The CEO says Quantcast numbers show that not only is Academia.edu the largest, but it is larger than all of its competitors put together. The company has raised $17.5 million in financing in several rounds since it was founded in 2008, the last of which was led by Silicon Valley-based Khosla Ventures.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/feed/0Medical student doing experiment in laboratoryMathewIs Facebook a political echo chamber? Social network says nohttp://fortune.com/2015/05/07/facebook-echo-chamber/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/facebook-echo-chamber/#commentsThu, 07 May 2015 22:24:28 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1112499]]>When looking at your Facebook news feed, do you feel that your friends’ posts about politics align with your own beliefs and that you agree with every article?

If so, then it’s all in your head, according to a report by the social networking giant Thursday. In fact, views are typically quite varied, the study found, helping to rebut complaints that the service – with the help of its shadowy algorithm that decides how prominently to display individual posts – has become an echo chamber for like-minded people.

Critics have long blamed Facebook and other social media companies for creating a more politically polarized climate. The thinking is that such services automatically filter out viewpoints that people don’t agree with, as a sort of business strategy.

But with the research, published Thursday inScience, Facebook is pushing back. The peer-reviewed journal gives the findings extra legitimacy that a typical self-serving press release couldn’t.

"We found that most people have friends who claim an opposing political ideology, and that the content in peoples' News Feeds reflect those diverse views," the company wrote in a blog post. "News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more aligned with an individual's own ideology, however the friends you choose and the content you click on are more important factors than News Feed ranking in terms of how much content you encounter that cuts across ideological lines."

In its research, Facebook looked at 10.1 million of its U.S. users for insight into how similar their political views were to their friends, how likely they were to come across diverse views in their news feed, and their interactions with content aligning with and opposing their views.

In a blog discussing its findings, Facebook pointed to two interesting phenomena. First, it found in 2012 that much of the information users were exposed to on its service and engaged with comes from friends with whom they have relatively loose ties. The explanation is that, yes, users are more likely to share content from people they’re close to and who have similar outlooks. But social networks are typically so large – filled with people who are mere acquaintances – that most content surfaced in the news feed is inevitably diverse.

Second, recent research has shown that the power of endorsement from people in our social network can trump political ideology. This means that, for example, users are more likely to click on a news article supporting an opposing political view that a friend has shared than one supporting their own ideology from a source with whom they have no social connection.

Overall, Facebook has found the following:

On average 23% of people's friends claim an opposing political ideology

Of the hard news content that people's friends share, 29.5% of it cuts across ideological lines

When it comes to what people see in News Feed, 28.9% of the hard news encountered cuts across ideological lines, on average

24.9% of the hard news content that people actually clicked on cuts across ideological lines

While Facebook’s data teams constantly investigate a variety of questions about users’ behaviors and how the social network impacts them, the question of the echo chamber could be of particular important as Facebook’s interest in being a news source continues to increase.

For more about Facebook, watch this Fortune video:

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/facebook-echo-chamber/feed/0Inside The F8 Facebook Developers ConferencekiakokalitchevaBenchling wants to become the Salesforce of biotechhttp://fortune.com/2015/04/15/benchling-funding-biotech/
http://fortune.com/2015/04/15/benchling-funding-biotech/#commentsWed, 15 Apr 2015 22:11:08 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1080269]]>Benchling, a nearly three-year-old startup, is transforming the biotech industry. But it isn’t working in cells and DNA. It’s instead working in bits and bytes to create a series of cloud-based tools for researchers that can accelerate research and development by tracking details about experiments, helping collaboration between researchers and streamlining data analysis.

The San Francisco-based startup is entering a new phase of expansion after raising $5 million in new financing led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Thrive Capital, Benchling said Wednesday. The company plans to use the funds to expand the company’s commercial operations, including building up its software engineering and global support teams.

Benchling, which recently introduced its Benchling Research Platform that unites its existing suite of applications in one place, aims to create a unified place where researchers can log, store and analyze the data from various experiments. It operates like a system of record where the entire scope of a research project is executed within a single eco-system–allowing an organization to have all its institutional knowledge at its fingertips. Benchling is essentially aiming to be a biotech version of the Salesforce CRM, the cloud-computing company known for a service used widely by corporate sales teams.

“Salesforce has this rich ecosystem and ends up being where you do all your work, we envision something similar,” CEO and founder Sajith Wickramasekara told Fortune. “Research has a distinctly physical component. Our vision is to create that bridge to the physical world within a single platform.”

Biotech research has become increasingly distributed across different offices, labs, and institutions, and few institutions have a unified platform. Big biotech companies often have their own systems to use internally–allowing their researchers to share data and notes across projects and offices. Academic institutions and smaller labs haven’t had the resources to invest in those IT-heavy projects, though can use offerings like Amazon Web Services to collate and share data in a similar way.

Scientists sometimes work across five to six different tools, from an excel document to Evernote to other proprietary software programs for molecular biology research. Not only that, much of the tracking software out there today was designed for chemistry research (i.e. for the types of drugs made from chemical molecules, like aspirin or Viagra). Biotech research is different. It requires DNA analysis and imaging of living cells. Benchling has designed its platform for those specific needs.

“We spend billions of dollars on biomedical research annually–it’s literally a matter of life and death,” said Balaji Srinivasa, board partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Yet, we don’t spend anywhere near as much effort on making the results of that research reproducible, searchable and machine-readable.”

Benchling changes that equation by offering a suite of tools, centered around its digital laboratory notebook–essentially a digitized and connected version of the physical object researchers already use. It has apps for designing DNA, annotating gel images and creating interactive protocols (or the recipe) for a research project–the basics needed for a successful biotech discovery.

Wickramasekara, in partnership with Ashu Singhal, started the company in May 2012 during his junior year in college. He had planned to get his Ph.D and work in biotech, not actual tech. But he quickly became frustrated with the dated methods of logging and tracking information.

“As someone who had been programming most of my life, I became frustrated with science,” Wickramasekara said. “The industry runs on Excel spreadsheets and data silos that don’t connect, and I wanted to bring better ease of use to this space.”

While Wickramasekara’s vision for how research should be conducted will take years to realize, Benchling has already made in-roads in the industry. Currently more than 6,000 scientists across 1,000 research institutions use Benchling for their work, doing things like creating biofuels, developing vaccines, and researching antibodies. They have an especially strong presence at MIT, Stanford and Harvard, Wickramasekara said.

The company’s next step, using the latest round of funding, is to scale up to work more with industry heavyweights, adding to the 20 corporate clients with which it currently works. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, Benchling’s investors include Y Combinator, Rock Health, FF Angel, SV Angel, Tim Draper, Geoff Ralson, Kevin Mahaffey and Matt Huang.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/04/15/benchling-funding-biotech/feed/0pr_eln_screenshotlorenzettifortuneYour commute is probably getting longerhttp://fortune.com/2015/03/25/nearby-jobs/
http://fortune.com/2015/03/25/nearby-jobs/#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 18:31:46 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1052675]]>There are fewer jobs located near metro area workers, according to a study released Tuesday that measured employment patterns since 2000.

Jobs within the “typical commuting distance” for workers in major metro areas dropped 7% overall between 2000 and 2012, found a report by the Brookings Institution citing Census Bureau data. Lower-income and minority workers saw the number of nearby jobs fall more than their middle-class and white counterparts.

From the report:

As employment suburbanized, the number of jobs near both the typical city and suburban resident fell. Suburban residents saw the number of jobs within a typical commute distance drop by 7 percent, more than twice the decline experienced by the typical city resident (3 percent). In all, 32.7 million city residents lived in neighborhoods with declining proximity to jobs compared to 59.4 million suburban residents.

The hardest-hit areas have been Ohio’s Cleveland-Elyria and Michigan’s Detroit-Warren-Dearborn metropolitan areas, where the number of jobs near a typical resident dropped about 26% each. Meanwhile, Texas’ McAllen-Edinburg-Mission metro area saw the number of nearby jobs up nearly 58%.

“When people live near their jobs, they’re more likely to be employed and the length of time they spend looking for jobs tends to be shorter,” Natalie Holmes, a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution, told Bloomberg. “It’s great that we’re continuing to recover jobs, but where jobs are located matters.”

The plan involves collecting and analyzing the genetic data from more than 1 million American volunteers in order to deepen the breadth of genetic data that could be used to better understand how diseases affect people, and how medicines could better target and treat those illnesses.

President Obama initially previewed the Precision Medicine Initiative in his State of the Union address last week, saying that he wants “the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine -- one that delivers the right treatment at the right time.”

Obama earmarked $215 million in his 2016 budget proposal to kickstart the effort, including $130 million for the National Institutes of Health to create a national research database to collect a wide range of health data, including volunteers’ genomes.

The goal is to create a data-rich, searchable database that would allow researchers to better pinpoint the sources of diseases and create individually-tailored treatment plans. The new effort will “bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes -- and give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier,” Obama said.

Kathy Giusti, founder and executive chairman of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, says that we have only “scratched the surface of what is possible” when it comes to precision medicine, and “the successes to date are life-changing for those who benefit, and have laid important groundwork for similar approaches across all cancers.”

Researchers have worked for several decades to understand the underlying basis of diseases and develop medicines targeted to the genetic profile of individual patients. This movement is known as “personalized,” or “individualized” medicine.

It requires reams of data to compare how specific diseases are expressed across different patients, or even how healthy patients avoid certain diseases. For instance, certain research labs are studying DNA from healthy volunteers and looking for rare genetic outliers that actually protect against disease rather than lead to illness. Those good genetic outliers could point to treatments for the rest of us.

In one case, researchers found that people naturally missing working copies of a gene known as PCSK9 had almost no bad cholesterol in their blood. Scientists used that insight to develop drugs that block the PCSK9 gene in order to lower cholesterol. It worked. Two such drugs are nearing the Food and Drug Administration’s approval, and studies have found that they help lower cholesterol levels, sometimes by as much as 75%.

Large-scale genomic studies are possible today because of the lower cost and time needed to sequence a genome. It costs about $1,000 to analyze one person’s DNA -- a fraction of the nearly $3 billion it cost to decode the first human genome 15 years ago.

The White House’s initiative calls on the National Cancer Institute, the FDA and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to all play a role in the effort to create and maintain this new database. President Obama is also hoping that the private sector, including universities and foundations, will get involved to “lay the foundation” for the initiative.

The NCI will use the genomic data to create a new cancer knowledge network that will specifically focus on advances in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of various cancers.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/obama-launches-dna-data-drive-to-revolutionize-disease-treatments/feed/0Obama DNA 2015lorenzettifortuneB-school Dean of the Year: Dartmouth’s Paul Danoshttp://fortune.com/2014/12/23/dartmouth-paul-danos-business-school-dean-of-the-year/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/23/dartmouth-paul-danos-business-school-dean-of-the-year/#commentsTue, 23 Dec 2014 17:48:13 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=918292]]>(Poets&Quants) — When Paul Danos arrived in Hanover, N.H., to become dean of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, Google did not yet exist, Amazon hadn't launched its online store, Steve Jobs was still two years away from returning to Apple, and Toyota had yet to launch the Prius. The horrific events of 9/11 could hardly be imagined, nor could the Great Recession.

It was 1995, and the school that Danos agreed to lead was, in the words of one of its most famous professors, "in a vulnerable place, like a major league baseball team with a losing record." Tuck had plunged to 13th place in Businessweek's ranking in 1994, far from the top five ranking the school received on the magazine's debut list six years earlier.

Some 20 years later, as Danos prepares to step down from the deanship on June 30 of next year, he will leave an institution that now has his deft fingerprints firmly implanted on every aspect of the school. "Paul Danos transformed Tuck's faculty into a world-class academic powerhouse, built a gorgeous campus, raised a ridiculous amount of money, moved the school into the top of the rankings, and became the most trusted administrator at Dartmouth," says Paul Argenti, a long-time Tuck professor of corporate communications. "We shall never see the likes of him again."

For his extraordinary 20-year tenure and for the vast improvements he has led at Tuck, Poets&Quants names Danos its Dean of the Year. Few leaders have had the kind of impact over a prestige institution. Roughly half of the B-school's 10,000-plus living alumni will have graduated under Danos’ deanship, while 75% of the faculty have been hired while he held the dean's office. At a time when the average term of a B-school dean is a mere three-and-a-half years, Danos has been the longest serving dean of any top business school in the world, and he has used that time wisely.

Under his watch, the school expanded the size and scope of its programs, adding nine centers and initiatives, a master's in health care delivery, a fast-track summer business program for undergraduates, as well as an expansion of the B-school's executive education portfolio. During his deanship, Danos also built up the school's reputation for academic research by bringing in thought leaders such as Ken French in finance and Kevin Keller in marketing.

He grew Tuck’s full-time faculty from 34 to 55 members, and increased full-time enrollment by a third, to four incoming sections of 60 students each from three when he arrived. Danos raised the school's endowment from $59.2 million to $310 million, and he oversaw an increase in the participation rate of alums for Tuck's annual giving campaign from 63%, when the effort raised $1.6 million, to an unprecedented 70%-plus, with funds of $6.4 million. Most top 10 business schools have giving rates in the 20% range.

"Overall, he has just improved the quality of the place on every single dimension, from the facilities to the students and faculty," says Robert Hansen, senior associate dean who served as the chairman of the search committee that brought Danos on campus. "On every front, he has always tried to make the school better. I don't think we'll ever find somebody who so selflessly works for the institution."

Yet, among Danos' most lasting achievements is what he didn't change. Under his leadership, Tuck maintained and even built upon its unique and open culture: a smart, friendly place known for an esprit de corps that creates deep bonds among students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Danos fit that culture like a glove, making himself accessible, frequently walking the halls, creating recognition celebrations for staff, auctioning off for charity an annual crayfish dinner that he prepared for students, and maintaining an open-door policy.

"At any top school, you get really smart students who are energized by what they are doing," says Connie Helfat, a strategy professor who had taught at Wharton and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management before joining Tuck in 1998. "What's unusual at Tuck is the loyalty they have to the place and the bonding they do with each other. I have never seen anything like this. It just permeates the place, and Paul has been fundamental to how well the school has done."

Described by colleagues as a no-nonsense pragmatist, Danos is an unassuming gentleman, whose passions include writing and cartooning. In his office, where he works at a standup desk due to a weak back, one cabinet holds photographs of his wife, his two daughters and three grandchildren, and dozens of his cartoons. He gives most of his cartoons to his grandchildren on their birthdays or at Christmas. A favorite of his depicts a fluffy black sheep with the caption, "If one more person asks me, 'Have you any wool?' I am going to scream."

An unlikely academic

Danos, a soft-spoken man with impeccable manners who is now 72 years old, seemed an unlikely academic. His parents were Cajuns, who migrated from the Bayou Lafourche to the West Bank of the Mississippi across from New Orleans in the 1930s. They were hard working, uneducated people who spoke a unique dialect of the French language. Until Danos' father went into business for himself, the family was poor by modern standards, living in a home with no carpets, drapes, central heating, or air conditioning. There was little discussion about the outside world--on government, on foreign affairs, even sports--in their home.

“As might be true for any young American from a humble subculture whose parents’ first language was not English, I went through a period of lamenting my meager preparation for life and career,” wrote Danos in a book of Cajun stories he wrote called The Other Side of the River. “All of that is gone now, except as a dull memory, but it was real and painful far into my adulthood….”

When Danos was 15, he taught himself accounting and began keeping the books for his father’s business, a supplier to the growing oil industry in the area. He majored in accounting at the University of New Orleans and became a certified public accountant. For five years after college, he worked in accounting for Freeport Moran in New Orleans.

Danos entered an MBA night-program at the University of New Orleans, which gave him a first taste of academia. “I started thinking about applying to PhD programs and started reading what was expected of you,” he recalls. “It was an exciting moment in accounting and finance because it was the time of explosion of data and being able to analyze things. All of that interested me, and I realized you could make a good living in academia as long as you were good enough to get a PhD and publish papers. I found it a viable path.”

Danos was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Texas’s business school. He quit his job and became a full-time accounting adjunct teacher for a year at the University of New Orleans until starting his PhD the following summer. It was a big leap. “There were only two times in my life that I felt I was in over my head: when I started teaching full-time and when I first presented at a PhD seminar. I realized how easy it is to be a critic and how hard it is to be the author of a work.”

After earning his PhD in 1974, Danos was recruited to the University of Michigan’s business school by then Dean Gil Whitaker, who would become a mentor to Danos. Danos taught accounting, chaired the accounting group, and after 15 years in the trenches of academia, he became associate dean and then senior associate dean of the MBA program at Michigan. It was in this role that he, along with Professor Noel Tichy and Jim Danko, now president of Butler University, created what is now the defining attribute of the school’s MBA program: the Multidisciplinary Action Projects, which gathered teams of students to work on real corporate challenges. It would become one of the pioneering experiential programs in business education.

“I had been teaching in the MBA program for some time and it was kind of classic and not all that exciting,” remembers Danos. “We started thinking about what could add an exciting element in the late 1980s.” A committee he chaired designed a new core curriculum, with this experiential addition. “It was pretty radical. We carved out a seven-week block where all the students did was this MAP project. Most experiential things don't take up half a term, so even today the MAP program is different….” Surprisingly, there was little faculty opposition, even though it meant compressing other courses to make room for the projects.

Then, Tuck called. Danos admits his knowledge of Northern New England was so sparse that he had asked his wife, Mary Ellen, to get out the family atlas to see where Hanover, N.H., was located. When he started the job in July 1995, he found a tight-knit school that had a superb reputation for its teaching faculty, but was light on academic research. Gradating only 180 MBAs a year also made Tuck less attractive to many corporate recruiters. Tuck senior associate dean Hansen recalls a conversation he had with a visiting recruiter from Ford. “I told him, ‘I hope you’re having a good time,’ and he said, ‘So do I, because if I don’t get someone, I don’t know if I’ll come back next year.'”

Bringing research chops to a small, New England school

Danos not only wanted to increase the size of the place, he wanted to do so in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the culture that made Tuck so unique. And he also wanted to recruit more faculty with research chops. It was a move that could have potentially weakened the quality of teaching in the classrooms, but Danos insisted that his newly recruited professors do both.

Initially, Danos focused on recruiting senior faculty with established track records. After building a research environment, hiring shifted to rookie professors. Tuck was at an immediate disadvantage because it lacked a PhD program. To make the school more attractive, Danos reduced teaching loads, gave faculty research budgets they could control, and brought in a staff of full-time computing professionals to help with statistical analysis and database management. Then, the school added a group of Tuck Fellows, full-time staffers to help faculty design cases, run review sessions and help with grading. The faculty came from Duke, MIT, Yale, Harvard and many other top business schools.

Teaching remained an imperative, however. “If we go after someone, they know that teaching is important at Tuck,” says Hansen, who helped recruit faculty to the school. “We live and die on the MBA program.”

Hansen says student evaluations of professors and courses remained extremely high throughout the transformation. Danos agrees. “As we have grown and gotten a more scholarly faculty, we have also improved the spirit of the place,” says Danos. “It is a myth that if you get that kind of faculty you will lose the learning characteristics that everyone wants. Every year 280 strangers come into this place and they form this unbelievable bond over a year and they have it for life.”

The biggest challenge for Danos was “to try to close the circle between the depth of faculty understanding in their fields and a great learning experience in the classroom.”

The result: An innovation called Research To Practice seminars, courses that allow a professor to share research interests with groups of no more than 15 students. “Those seminars,” says Danos, “are as close to closing the circle for MBAs as I have seen anywhere. It's expensive, but it does something that reconciles this long-standing friction between research and teaching.”

When Danos first proposed the idea, many faculty believed students would have little interest in the seminars. Undaunted, he forged ahead, proved their success, and now there are a dozen of them a year. “Today, these courses are among the highest rated we have,” says Danos. “It allowed me to create something that is compatible with the way I see the ideal business faculty. It feels right from every angle. It touches on the core of why we have academics teaching in business schools, and the students love it.”

Hansen, who taught one of the first seminars on the economics of the credit crisis in the spring of 2009, helped make the idea a success. “In the old days, you might go to a professor’s house for dinner. We still do a fair amount of that. But with 12 students siting around a table and talking about research, you have that interaction at an intellectual plane.”

An informal, authentic leadership style

Throughout the changes, Danos remained highly accessible. For one thing, he likes to walk the halls, stop by the office of a faculty member and informally engage. “He just shows up in your office,” says Helfat. “The first time he did this, I was shocked. I never had a dean show up unannounced in my office. And then I realized he just came to see what I was up to and to chat.”

Sally Jaeger, assistant dean and director of the MBA program, recalls a time two years ago when Danos wandered into her office. “I was at my computer and had just found out that my mother was diagnosed with cancer. He looked at me and immediately noticed I was distressed. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. I told him and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘What can I do?’ Before I knew it, he was putting me in touch with doctors who could help.”

During the 9/11 attacks, Danos was in the Midwest. He immediately cancelled all classes on campus. “Paul literally got a car and driver to bring him back to the east coast because there were no planes,” remembers Ella Bell, a professor of organizational behavior. “From the car, he called everyone from New York asking if they had family there and if there was anything he could do. We had students who lost family members and dear friends. Some of our students had worked in the towers during their summer internships and just came back.

“We came up with a design for our classes that was supportive, nurturing and taking care of the important matters at heart, not just at business. We turned that into an incredible teaching moment. That was under Paul's guidance.”

Each spring, there’s a charity auction for Tuck’s Center for Business and Society. Danos always auctions off a crawfish boil for some 20 students. It has become one of the most popular items at the auction. The dean imports crawfish from Louisiana, cooks them up at home, and brings them to Tuck to be served to students.

Colleagues describe Danos as an extremely ambitious but unselfish idealist. “I have known many deans who want to leave their stamp on an institution,” says Giovanni Gavetti, a Tuck professor of business administration who has taught at both Harvard Business School and Wharton. “I don't think Paul cares about that. He is singlehandedly obsessed with the quality of the experience for the student. On that front, he has delivered.”

Danos has an annual one-on-one meeting with each faculty member to discuss their research. The meetings last 90 minutes. “He talks about your research and he knows everything about it,” says Gavetti. “I suspect he had read some of my papers because he has a fairly intimate knowledge of my research and my plan to develop it. And he tells you what he thinks. Once he told me, ‘I think that is bullshit. Why are you doing that?’ I never heard anything like that from a dean.”

When Danos announced his retirement last spring at a school meeting, he received a standing ovation from faculty and staff. “They would not sit down until I begged them to so Paul could say a few words,” recalls Hansen. The reaction of Ella Bell, who had joined Tuck as a professor 15 years ago and considers Danos her mentor and ‘Big Cheese,” was typical. She cried. We are very hopeful that we will get a phenomenal new dean,” she says, “but Paul leaves big footprints to follow.”

Ask Danos what most fills him with pride among all of his accomplishments over those 20 years, and he doesn’t hesitate. “It’s the ability to bring these two worlds together, the world of research and the great classroom experience," he says. "It's like standing up in a birch canoe. It's easy to tip. You have to have quite a bit of balance to keep it going down the stream because it tips over fairly easy. To be able to do that and keep the team in a stable way is something that is gratifying to me. It's a good feeling."

It seems so, according to a new study. The research, published in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, found that having more job authority increases depression among women, but decreases it among men.

The survey was conducted among more than 1,300 middle-aged men and 1,500 middle-aged women, all of whom graduated from high school in Wisconsin. It was conducted by sociologist Tetyana Pudrovska of the University of Texas and Amelia Karraker, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Iowa State University.

The obvious question is why does this happen?

"Years of social science research suggests that women in positions of authority deal with interpersonal tension, negative social interactions, negative stereotypes, prejudice, social isolation, as well as resistance from subordinates, colleagues and superiors," Pudrovska said.

"Women in authority positions are viewed as lacking the assertiveness and confidence of strong leaders," she added. "But when these women display such characteristics, they are judged negatively for being unfeminine. This contributes to chronic stress."

Men, meanwhile, tend to find positions of authority are more in line with what they perceive their status to be, Pudrovska said.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/11/20/executive-jobs-are-making-women-depressed/feed/0Careers Icon thumbnailbgfortuneFor top female scientists, starting a family is a major setbackhttp://fortune.com/2014/11/13/female-scientists-family-setback/
http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/female-scientists-family-setback/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 18:00:06 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=865252]]>Women across industries struggle to navigate the competing demands of career and family. This balancing act is even trickier for research scientists. They have a small window in their late twenties and early thirties to stay competitive by publishing papers and landing research grants.

As the mother of a toddler, Lauren O'Connell has experienced the tension first-hand. "There is a perception that raising a family and being a female scientist are mutually exclusive," she says. O'Connell is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, where she's studying how chemicals found on the skin of poisonous dart frogs can be used to create painkillers, antibiotics and heart medications. "As scientists, our graduate school and postdoctoral years are expected to be our most productive, but for women, they also coincide with our child-bearing years, so managing the two can be very difficult."

Universities have started offering benefits like paid maternity leave and lactation rooms. But despite these accommodations, women with children still find themselves falling behind their male colleagues. Many female scientists will abandon their research right when they are about to hit their stride: women receive 46% of science doctorates in the U.S., yet only a third of scientists employed in tenure-track positions are women and less than a quarter of full professors are women.

O'Connell says that the timing of professional support is behind this trend. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are trying to promote more women, she explains, but they tend to fund scientists who are further along in their careers--an issue, since many women have already left the field by that point.

Private companies are now stepping up to give women scientists help earlier on, when they are in the thick of raising young children. Since 2003, L'Oreal has awarded an annual Women in Science grant of $60,000 to help exceptional female scientists through this critical stage of their careers--and O'Connell is among this year's pool of recipients.

It's no coincidence that four out of five of this year's winners are new mothers. Livia Eberlin, for instance, is a postdoctoral scientist at Stanford who is developing a new method of rapidly diagnosing cancer; she's also the mother of a six-month old baby girl. She's noticed that many of her male colleagues did not take advantage of paternity leave when their wives had babies. "For a woman, you just don't have that option," says Eberlin. "Not that I wouldn't want to take that time off to bond with my newborn, but it just shows how easy it is for women to fall behind their male colleagues."

Eberlin has had to take her baby to an inconveniently located daycare facility because the options near Stanford are too expensive. The L'Oreal grant, though, will allow her to afford a closer alternative. "It was a problem I was facing in my personal life that bled into my work because I had to drive so far every day," she says. "It was slowing me down." O'Connell, for her part, says the money will allow her to spend more time with her daughter because she will no longer need spend hours a day writing grant proposals, which is one of the less glamorous parts of an academic scientist's life.

However, money can only help so much. There are many deep-rooted forms of gender discrimination in academic science that require cultural change. For instance, a study released earlier this year found that while doing fieldwork, 64% of women scientists have been sexually harassed and one in five has been a victim of sexual assault.

In more subtle ways, the male-dominated environment in research labs affects women's everyday lives. Eberlin describes having to battle stereotypes from male colleagues who assume she is not as academically equipped as they are. These perceptions are only made worse when she has to visit the lactation room every two hours. "In the chemistry department--a workplace that is almost entirely male--trying to pump milk is so awkward," she says. "It can be challenging; in the end, you have to show what you can do through your work."

The recipients of the L'Oreal award believe that the only way to tackle these problems is to bring more women into the field. Eberlin plans to use part of her funding to hire female research assistants. O'Connell is inviting high school students from the Science Club for Girls organization to help with research projects.

Both Eberlin and O'Connell have faith that the tides can turn quickly if more female scientists demonstrate to young women that they can have a family while also pursuing cutting edge research. Eberlin says that the women who have been successful, despite the odds, have a responsibility to make the path easier for others. "I used to go into meetings where I was the only female chemist and feel intimidated," she says. "But it dawned on me that I was there representing other women; I need to do my best to create opportunities for them."

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/female-scientists-family-setback/feed/0Sara Kerens, L'Oreal Fellow Tourcleahey89When C+ men outearn A+ womenhttp://fortune.com/2014/05/23/when-c-men-outearn-a-women/
http://fortune.com/2014/05/23/when-c-men-outearn-a-women/#commentsFri, 23 May 2014 15:54:26 +0000http://beta.fortune.com/?p=461846]]>If you didn’t do so great in high school, rest easy! You can still make a decent living for yourself -- assuming, that is, that you’re a man.

Equal pay has been a hotly debated topic for the past few months, and new research from the University of Miami suggests women are paid significantly less than men even if they were much better students.

The study sought to determine what affect a person’s high school grade point average has on their future earnings. Because of the disparity between men and women, it chose to break the data up by gender, and found that women with a 4.0 GPA in high school make less on average than a man with a 2.5 GPA.

The issue of pay equity got a big publicity push on April 8 around “Equal Pay Day.” It was also heavily in the news last week when Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, was fired as reports suggested that her dismissal was due to her inquiries about being paid less than the man who formerly had her job.